Proclamation to the World

"Understanding these truths ought to make it easier for us to feel like a little child, not just as we read the proclamation, but throughout our lives, because we are children-but in what a family and of what parents! We can picture ourselves as we were, for longer than we can imagine, sons and daughters associating in our heavenly home with parents who knew and loved us. But now we can see ourselves home again with our heavenly parents, in that wonderful place, not only as sons and daughters but husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, grandsons and granddaughters, bound together forever in loving families. And we know that in the premortal world we were men or women, with unique gifts because of our gender, and that the opportunity to be married and to become one was necessary for us to have eternal happiness." Eternal Marriage pg 105

The aspect of an Eternal Family is one that I often think and ponder on. What it means and why it is so important? Viewing it as a child who is always so happy to go to grandma and grandpas house or to an aunt and uncles house rather then to a friend should show us the value that we as college students should also place on the family. The opportunity to spend time with family is often dismissed and talked down by the world focused on social connections and political movements. This view, to my belief, is one of distortional value. We need to love our family and seek for every opportunity to spend some time with them. Often it is after we lose someone that we realize how much we missed, we should not let the affairs of the world cloud the importance of the family. As I think of the premortal experience I am often left wondering who I spent my time with, often I wish to say that it was an amazing prophet or historical figure of importance. But upon further reflection I have come to believe that the ones that we spent the most time with were our families that we would have here on earth, and because in the postmortal life we will spend all of our time with our families it offers support for my belief. That of course in addition to our Heavenly Father and our Savior, Jesus Christ. They were the ones who taught us and we take from those who we love most the attributes that we love most. Each of us has developed our personalities in concert with those who we are related to and those personalities obviously got along well enough in the premortal existence that the question arises, Why don't they now?